Socio-demographic characteristics of children and young adults with varied asthma control- does it make a difference?

Background: The socioeconomic status and caregiver perception of asthma as a disease, the availability of specialty care and medication adherence have major influence on outcome of asthma control in children with asthma. The control of asthma therefore depends on the optimizing the interplay of these factors taking into consideration the regional and racial variations.

Objective: The objective of this study was to evaluate the association between socio-demographic factors and asthma control outcome in children with asthma.

Materials and methods: This was a cross-sectional study involving 66 consecutively enrolled participants with asthma whose economic burden for asthma was assessed in a previous study. Based on the number of registered children attending the clinic, a minimum sample size of 66 calculated for this study was obtained.The participants were consenting children and young adults between the ages of 1 and 20 years. Using standard methods, data on socio-economic status, personal and family demographics, including household number, mothers' educational attainments and employment status; and asthma control were collected and analyzed. Asthma control was assessed using Asthma control test (ACT) and guided by the original developers scoring, participants were grouped into well controlled, partly controlled and uncontrolled. The Chi-square test was used to test for association between participants' socio-demographic characteristics (age, socioeconomic status, mothers' education and employment, and number of children in the household) and asthma control status at 5% level of significance.

Results: Of all study participants, 34 (51.55%) were male, with mean age (SD) of 11.6 (4.8) years. The mean (SD) age at initial asthma diagnosis was 6.2 (4.6) years. The majority 49(76.5%) of the mothers had tertiary education. Study participants belonging to the poorest; very poor; poor; and least poor socio-economic cadres were, 16 (24.2%); 17 (25.8%); 17 (25.8%); and 16 (24.2%) respectively. Asthma control classification showed that, 26 (39.4%); 31 (47%) and 9 (13.6%) participants had well controlled asthma, partially controlled asthma and uncontrolled asthma respectively. The factors like age, socioeconomic status, mothers 'educational level, employment status and number of children in the household did not show any statistically significant association with the asthma control status of participants.

Conclusions: Asthma control outcome remains multifactorial as participants' socio-demographic characteristics did not impact on the level of control of asthma, among participants in the south eastern parts of Nigeria, despite being in a LMIC. A larger study is recommended to further explore this.